Restoring the Bronx

In 718-acre Bronx Park, forests and rock outcrops shield visitors from the urban reality of the borough. Floating down this portion of the river, you might think you’re in rural New England. Photograph by Adam Spangler.

Since just about everybody who has the means flees New York City on the weekends, it should come as no surprise that most people are more familiar with the Bronx River Parkway than the Bronx River. But here I am in a canoe, paddling down an eight-mile stretch of the city’s last remaining freshwater river. This far south, the Hudson River is a tidal estuary, containing salt water from the Atlantic Ocean. The same goes for the East River. There used to be dozens of rivers within the city’s five boroughs, but most were filled in long ago.

Our route will take us from the upper reaches of Bronx Park, near the border with Westchester County, downstream to Hunts Point Riverside Park, near the confluence of the Bronx and East Rivers. In the 1830s, the Bronx River’s water was so pure that government officials considered tapping it for drinking water. Sixty years later, the river was declared “an open sewer” by the Bronx Valley Sewer Commission—a body that presumably knew its sewers. Even 10 years ago, a trip down the river would not have been advisable. But after people started complaining and community groups started organizing, the city began paying attention to the state of the river.

Watch video of the author’s trip down the Bronx River.

The borough’s congressman, Democrat José Serrano, took a seat on the House Appropriations Committee in 1993 and eventually earmarked $30 million for the Bronx River. “This is my 34th year in public office,” the congressman told me. “And the only issue that has been with me that entire time is the Bronx River. It was first brought to my attention when I was in the New York State Assembly, in the 70s. We did what we could, but nothing really happened until I went to Congress, where one of the tools that gets such bad publicity turns out to be a good thing. And that was my ability to get on the Appropriations Committee and funnel dollars from the federal government into the Bronx River.”

A dam turned waterfall on the property of the Bronx Zoo forces the Bronx River Alliance’s Linda Cox and Miguel Rodriguez to portage a boat. Photograph by Adam Spangler.

Thanks in part to Serrano, an extensive restoration project has quietly brought the Bronx River back to life. Riverbanks have been rebuilt. Floodplains reopened. Water quality rehabilitated. Fish populations re-stocked. Industrial wastelands transformed into parklands. “For pretty much the first time in almost a century, the river is inviting to both the people and animals that previously avoided it,” says John Calvelli, senior vice president of public affairs for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Still, it ain’t exactly wilderness. According to the renewal project’s official management plan, which was drafted in the mid-1990s, “landform features, stream morphology, and vegetation patterns have been so heavily altered that most of the characteristics of a healthy river can never be completely restored.” Serrano puts it more concisely: “Things were pulled out from that river, from half a Jeep to all kinds of stuff we can’t mention in a family magazine.”

Imagine the locals’ surprise, then, when a wild beaver arrived in 2007 and started gnawing away at the trees along the banks. Manhattan was settled on beaver pelt, but it had been two centuries since one had been spotted in the city. The community gave Congressman Serrano his due and named the animal José. Another milestone was the re-introduction of alewife, a native herring that had been extinct in the river only a few years ago.

Once considered a state-of-the-art restoration technique, stacks of tires keep riverbanks from eroding into the channel. Cox and Rodriguez plan to replace them with natural, earthen banks. Photograph by Adam Spangler.

From the New York Botanical Garden to the Bronx Zoo, both of which reside in Bronx Park, we paddle along forested floodplains that stretch out as far as 200 feet from the river and, along with large masses of igneous rock, create a buffer zone that protects the imagination from the surrounding urban reality. The wave of industrialization that transformed the South Bronx largely missed this area, and it still looks like something out of rural New England. A great blue heron flies overhead. A muskrat slithers out of the water and up the muddy shore.

Concrete Plant Park, then and now. Left: The dilapidated plant in 2004, before the property was transformed into a park. Photograph courtesy Bronx River Alliance .Right: The space in 2007, after three years of cleanup and construction. Freshly painted, the silos serve as industrial sculpture. The park, which is located near the confluence of the Bronx and East Rivers, will open to the public this summer. Courtesy Joan Byron/ Pratt Center for Community
Development

Past the zoo, however, the view changes very quickly. Floodplains give way to concrete, tires, and bricks, which used to prop up buildings that appear ready to topple into the water. Homeless squatters huddle under bridges.

The river runs about 24 miles, from upper Westchester County to the East River, and few know it better than our guide, Linda Cox. She’s the executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, a coalition of city and community organizations dedicated to resurrecting the river. When Cox joined the Alliance, in 2002, she had a vision of bringing the country to the city. “How far can we go to keep ourselves in touch with nature within our very confined urban city?” she wonders. “New York City is used to solving things in a hard-infrastructure way, but that seldom works with environmental problems that require fixing a myriad of smaller issues that eventually lead to a healthy watershed. You can’t address the river without addressing the entire watershed, and that’s no easy task. This is a new beginning for New York and nature.”

For almost every decrepit piece of real estate that we pass, there is a plan for a new beginning. We meander around an engineered bend in the river and come upon a floating net boom running the width of the river. Used to strain trash and debris from the water, it creates a traffic jam we’ll have to paddle through. On the shore, towering silos have been painted red and reclaimed as industrial sculpture. This is Concrete Plant Park, part of the Greenway project, which hopes to create a continuous chain of parks along the river by 2012. After years of remediation, including the removal of more than 10,000 discarded tires and concrete up to 10 feet deep along the shoreline, the park opens to the public this summer. “It was like removing a cast from an arm,” says Alexie Torres-Fleming, founder and executive director of the Bronx-based Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, which spearheaded the Concrete Plant reclamation effort. “It was corner-to-corner concrete, and now the earth can breathe again.”

We disembark from our canoes at Hunts Point Riverside Park, another dumping ground turned park. The Point Community Development Corporation led this conversion, and the space opened last year as the first waterfront park in Hunts Point in more than 50 years. Adam Green and his organization, Rocking the Boat, soon set up shop in the park’s boathouse. The group uses boatbuilding and on-water education to introduce high-school students to a world few of them knew existed.

In the South Bronx, the river’s ecosystem has been disrupted by pollution and mismanagement. In the decades ahead, however, all of this could change, allowing wildlife and people to enjoy a healthy river. Photograph by Adam Spangler.

The restoration of the Bronx River all started with the simple idea to clean up the river. But as the river came back to life, so did the surrounding community. Years from now, after all the money has been spent—local, state, and federal governments have pledged $100 million in all—there will still be work to be done. “Some people might think I’m romanticizing the river too much,” Congressman Serrano says. “But cleaning up the river has been more responsible for the resurgence of the Bronx than any other person, organization, or issue. The river is a symbol of hope.”